The Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History is a seminar-format lecture series stressing works-in-progress and is organized by PhD students in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia.

All events are free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served.

Fall 2018

An opaque and hovering concrete cube that opened to an interior of richly ornamented patios, the building was readily celebrated as the “the jewel” of the fair, exemplar of a refined modernism unlike much of the technological kitsch taking over the grounds of the 1964 Worlds' Fair in New York. The reception of the architecture that the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco brought into the world scene in 1964 echoed the praise stirred by the Spanish pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels, a gridded structure of steel and glass likewise applauded as an “unexpected gem of architecture.” Despite the formal and material discrepancies between the two buildings, both were quintessentially modern—and seemingly at odds with the fascist regime they were called to represent. As the Italian Bruno Zevi put it in 1958: “The Spanish Pavilion makes one wonder: maybe this country is no longer fascist? Or, is Franco now tired and allows artists an unusual freedom?”

Fascism was of course alive and well, and architecture continued to be as crucial an instrument for its production as it had been in the 1930s across Europe. Only now the world stage was shifting under Cold War dynamics and with it the ideological configurations, images, and techniques of fascism. In this talk, I will chronicle how architects, State officials, and intellectuals worked together to redefine the cultural narrative and aesthetic register of fascism at mid-century in Spain, a project aimed at securing the regime a place within the modernizing and modernist West all the while retaining, and in many ways reinforcing the myth of empire and religious essentialism that was at the core of the Spanish radical right. The historian and Secretary of Censorship Florentino Pérez-Embid coined this two-sided ideal most fittingly as “Westernization in the means, Hispanization in the ends.” This talk will focus on the architectural strategy that Pérez-Embid proposed to project, namely, the re-inscription of the country’s Islamic past into an abstract and modernized representation of Catholicism. With this synthesis, architecture was called to perform the Spanish Reconquista and western modernization in the very same aesthetic breadth and, in doing so, to transfer a colonial campaign then definitely waning in North Africa to the realm of cultural politics. Beginning with a series of historical revisions on the architecture of Al-Andalus and the Mudejar style between 1944 and 1952 and concluding with the 1958 and 1964 pavilions, this talk follows Spanish architects in navigating the East/West, Islam/modern divide as a predicament to the regime’s imperial imagination—and a Western scene in welcoming this agenda within its ranks.

Few careers lay open the complexities of architectural entanglements with gender, labor, and the politics of cultural heritage in the twentieth century as does that of Minnette De Silva (1918-1998): R.I.B.A. Associate, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medalist, C.I.A.M. participant, and co-founder of the journal MARG. She combined progressive and revivalist thrusts together, from her student work in the 1940s at the Sir J.J. College of Architecture and the Architectural Association to later studies of Asian architecture for MARG, Ekistics, and Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture. Her designs combined reinforced concrete technology and Surrealist composition techniques with Ceylonese arts and crafts and a gendered, village-based system of fabrication.

Though she was a fixture in modernist Bombay and London and engaged in some of the most important modern architectural interventions in South Asia, her appearances in the institutional record, and thus the history, are erratic. No formal archive documents her practice or professional biography, but her international itineraries and localized productions appear in her scrapbook-style memoir, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Part Bildungsroman and part architectural portfolio, the lone volume of the two she intended to publish offers an amputated narrative of engagements with significant institutions and figures and a similarly remarkable body of built works and writings. This aborted map offers a possible model for historiography—for histories of women, of South Asia, of architecture, of modernism—by throwing into question the reliance upon the catalogue raisonné and instead giving space to its occlusions, which may better serve to trace the creative life and intellectual labor of an architect in the world.

This talk will trace the use of color in European architectural drawing and prints between the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century. Its most basic premise posits that color was never an essential feature of architectural drawing but made so by an increasingly codified and precise system of architectural representation that responded to the demands of political institutions and the general public. Color provided a visual means of communication that sidestepped textual explication of technically and structurally complex building programs. Looking across national borders yet attentive to the eventual supremacy of a French model, this talk will address color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice.

See Piece Through Sunnydaysweety Black Lace New Black CA011723 One 2018 In his canonical 1936 chart mapping the development of modern art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of MoMA, prominently placed Constructivism and Suprematism right beneath Cubism. The two Russian avant-garde movements were considered its two more prominent outcomes, along with De Stijl and Neoplasticism – all of which drew on what he called, the “machine esthetic.” The Staatliche Bauhaus is placed just below—in turn, a product of these, also powered by the esthetic of the machine. Notwithstanding the prominent role assigned to the avant-garde, Barr chose to omit a contemporary of the Bauhaus—a school that, arguably, played a central role in articulating both the theoretical programs and the practical outcomes of its movements.

Conceived by the Bolshevik government as a “specialized educational institution for advanced artistic and technical training,” the Higher Art and Technical Studios, collectively known as Vkhutemas (Вхутемас), were created to “prepare highly qualified artist-practitioners for the modern industry.” From its establishment, this interdisciplinary school offered free education and accepted students from underprivileged backgrounds. While similar, according to Barr, to the Bauhaus in its “communistic spirit,” Vkhutemas, with an enrollment of over 2000 students, was an unprecedented modern undertaking, an institution that “focused on developing the masses.” The mandate for mass education was framed within the larger project of the industrialization of the Soviet economy and the grounding of everything—from artistic to labor practices—in science. Vkhutemas faculty emphasized the link between design practice and the so-called “objective method.” Continuous feedback between educational process and tests performed at various “research laboratories” at Vkhutemas facilitated an enormous leap in the development of both the theory and practice of modern space and form.

Paul Otlet's Mundaneum, and Le Corbusier's pyramidal design for it, confounded critics as soon as it was published in L'Architecture vivante in 1929. Lost in the clamor to denounce the project as needlessly monumental, and in Corbusier's vehement, if incredulous, defense of its functionality was the equivalence that Otlet drew between the pursuit of financial profit and the acquisition of higher consciousness. How was it that Otlet came to equate financial speculation and spiritual attainment? Why did he characterize both processes as democratic, and how did he so readily identify these twin and simultaneous processes of subject formation with the logic of the pyramid? Presenting a genealogy of cosmic imagining in architectural discourse stretching back to William Richard Lethaby's iconoclastic history of architecture from 1892, this paper addresses a blind spot in left criticism of the Mundaneum and opens an examination of the architectural designation of fraternity as a spirit animating economic globalization.

Piece CA011723 One See New Black Sunnydaysweety Lace 2018 Through Black

Lynnette Widder"Sep Ruf, Hans Schwippert and the Culture of Building in West German Modernism 1949-59" Wednesday, November 1, 6:30pm Room 832, Schermerhorn Hall Columbia University

The transformations in West German architecture between 1949 and 1959 were fast-paced and comprehensive, its idiom moving away from the light, filigree style of the early post-war period towards the robust, material expression that characterized International High Modern Architecture from the mid-1950s onwards. Despite the pace and intensity of these changes, however, they cannot be ascribed to a singular rhetorical program or movement. Instead, they represent the interplay of architectural expression and building construction developments, both influenced strongly by contemporary American precedents exported to West Germany through official and popular channels. The work of Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, friends and professional affiliates throughout the period studied, offers important insights into the pathways these transformations took through rhetoric, construction, reception and architecture expression. The comparison of these two architects’ construction practices and architectural expression is underpinned by an analysis of three decisive documents, which describe the changing manner in which West Germany defined its self-image through architecture between 1949 and 1959.

During the Weimar Republic, Breslau was Germany's seventh biggest city. The conflicts following World War I caused an exceptionally severe housing crisis in the region. Located at Germany's eastern periphery a few miles from the Polish border, Breslau protagonists had to negotiate their visions for the modern city against the backdrop of shifting boundaries, social unrest, and an increasingly nationalist discourse of self-justification. The talk will address both architectural propositions in a climate of extreme political tension as well as historiographical questions regarding a dual marginality.

Dirk van den HeuvelContested Spaces of the Open Society - Growth and Change in the Work of Jaap Bakema (1914–1981) Tuesday, April 5, 6:30pm 832 Schermerhorn Hall

Thursday, December 4, 6PM Stronach Center, Schermerhorn HallSonja DümpelmannUp in the Air and Down to Earth: On the Dialectics of Aerial Vision in Landscape and Urban Design

Concentrating on the period between 1920 and 1940, the talk will present ideas and practices central to the design professions that were either supported by or that emerged from aerial vision. It will show how viewing the earth from above redirected attention to bodily experience on the ground, and illustrates how design professionals understood the aerial view as simultaneously abstract and experiential, detailed and contextual, harmful and essential.

Sonja Dümpelmann is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of the Arts, Berlin, and has held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute, and at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. Her publications include a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004), and most recently Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014) as well as the edited Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2013), and the co-edited Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

The lecture will discuss the aesthetic and discursive limits of socialist modernism by focusing on architecture in Yugoslavia between 1950 and 1980. It will present Vjenceslav Richter's neo-avant-garde work and Bogdan Bogdanović's Surrealist-inspired war memorials as different manifestations of the surviving leftist culture from the prewar period.

Vladimir Kulić holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Austin and teaches architectural history and theory at Florida Atlantic University. His publications include Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (with Wolfgang Thaler and Maroje Mrduljaš, 2012), Unfinished Modernisations (edited with Maroje Mrduljaš, 2012), and Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities (edited with Monica Penick and Timothy Parker, forthcoming 2014). He is the current ACLS-NEH International and Area Studies Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Mario Carpo's research and publications focus on the relationship among architectural theory, cultural history, and the history of media and information technology. His Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001) has been translated into several languages. His most recent books are The Alphabet and the Algorithm, a history of digital design theory (2011), and The Digital Turn in Architecture, 1992-2012, an AD Reader.

Reto Geiser will discuss art historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion's persistent advances to improve visual literacy by offering students from all fields deeper insight into the history of art and architecture. From early proposals for an "education of vision," to his involvement with the "Explorations Group" in Toronto, to attempts exerting influence on the formation of the Visual Arts Center at Harvard, Geiser will trace how visual sensibilities that originated in the early twentieth century not only provided Giedion with a methodological framework to overcome disciplinary specialization, but also formed the basis for a broader dissemination of the principles of modern architecture.

Tuesday, March 26 Esra Akcan, University of Illinois at Chicago "News from the Living Room: Storytelling and Participatory Architectural Writing"

Wednesday, April 17 Alex Bremner, University of Edinburgh "Architecture, Religion, and British Global Expansion in the Nineteenth Century: Rethinking Empire and the Built Environment"

Black See One New Sunnydaysweety 2018 Lace CA011723 Black Through Piece

Juliet Koss is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and the author of Modernism after Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), a finalist for the College Art Association's Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her essays on modern European art, architecture, and related fields have appeared in journals and edited volumes in Europe and the United States and she has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and, in 2009, a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; in 2011 she was the Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where she taught seminars on the Bauhaus and on the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes. Her current book project, "Model Soviets," addresses the visual culture of the Soviet obsession with construction in the 1920s and 1930s and explores how documentary images of architecture—of models, of buildings covered in scaffolding, and of completed edifices—emblematized the role of construction more generally within the Soviet state.

"Filming the Future Perfect, Moscow 1938" explores the utopian grammar of architectural models in the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, focusing especially on Alexander Medvedkin's film The New Moscow, released in 1938 and removed from circulation by the censors. Showing architects looming over models for the Soviet capital, scenes filmed in Moscow's newly built metro and on its newly constructed streets, and Muscovites experiencing the built environment in a state of constant flux, The New Moscow tells the story of the design of a "living model of Moscow," a combination of large-scale architectural model and film projection that is presented to the Soviet public in the film's final scene. Possible reasons for the film's censorship abound; contravening Soviet cultural mandates to celebrate construction achievements through visual documentation, it includes documentary footage of large-scale destruction, reveals characters' confusion and nostalgia for the disappearing urban fabric, and overtly mocks construction propaganda. By poking fun at both Soviet technology and the utopian vision of the "living model," The New Moscow ridicules Soviet construction ideals and, by extension, the model Soviet future.

Wednesday, December 5 Jeremy Aynsley, Royal College of Art "A Tale of Two Germanys: Design in the 1950s and 60s in the GDR and FRG"

Juan José Lahuerta is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB). His primary interests include Gaudí, Dalí, Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe. His most recent publications are Le Corbusier (Milan, 2011), Estudios Antiguos (Madrid, 2010), and Humaredas. Arquitectura, ornamentación, medios impresos (Madrid, 2010). He is an editorial member of Casabella Milano, director of Mudito & Co. publications (Barcelona), and curator of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where she is also Director of the Master of Environmental Design Program. Her most recent works include Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2009) and Achtung Architektur! Image and Phantasm in Contemporary Austrian Architecture (MIT Press, 1996). She is the editor of Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment (Yale, 2011), and coeditor of Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale, 2006).

Wednesday, April 11 Guido Montanari, Polytechnic University of Turin (POLITO) "Architecture and Fascism: An 'Other' Modernity in Italy Between the Wars"

Guido Montanari is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Turin. His primary interest is in the fields of modern and contemporary architecture and city planning in Italy and Europe. His most recent publication is Architettura e cittá nel Novecento (with Andrea Bruno, Rome 2009), and his recent publications have focused on the neglected work of Amedeo Albertini (Skira, 2007) and Guiuseppe Momo (Celid, 2000).

José Lira is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planing in the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), where he presented both his PhD and PD Dissertations (1997 and 2008). He has served as a visiting scholar at GSAPP, Columbia University (2009), and as a Research Affiliate at the National Council of Research, Brazil (CNPq-BR). He is the author of Warchavchik: Fraturas da Vanguarda (Cosac & Naify, 2011), and edited Caminhos da Arquitetura, de Vilanova Artigas (Cosac & Naify, 2004), Tempo, Cidade e Arquitetura (FAU-USP/ Annablume, 2007) and Cidade: impasses e perspectivas (FAU-USP/ Annablume, 2007). He has also published chapters in books such as L'Aventure dês Mots de La Ville, Arquitetura + Arte + Cidade, Les Mots de la Stigmatisation Urbaine, and Rediscutindo o Modernismo, as well as articles in several journals in Brazil and elsewhere. He is currently the director of the University of São Paulo Center for Cultural Preservation (CPC-USP).

Claire Zimmerman is Assistant Professor of art history and architecture at the University of Michigan. She teaches courses on 19th and 20th century European and America architecture with emphases in Weimar Germany and the United Kingdom. Research interests include architecture culture as it interacts with commerce and industry, and the infrastructures of globalization that underpinned the spread of modern architecture throughout the 20th century. Her co-edited essay collection, Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (with Mark Crinson) appeared as Volume 21 in the Yale Studies in British Art (Yale University Press) in fall 2010; an earlier monograph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was published by Taschen in 2006. Zimmerman's recent work has appeared in OASE, AA Files, Perspecta, the Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She is completing a manuscript on photography in modern architecture in 2011. She was the 2009-2010 Helmut F. Stern Professor at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.

John Harwood is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at Oberlin. His research centers on the architectural articulation of science, technology, and corporate organization. His articles have appeared in Grey Room, AA Files, and do.co.mo.mo. He is co-author, with Janet Parks, of The Troubled Search: The Work of Max Abramovitz (2004), and co-author with Jesse LeCavalier and Guillaume Mojon of This - Will This (2009). His essays have also appeared in catalogues for the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2008, the V&A's exhibition Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 (2008), and several forthcoming edited volumes. His book, New 2018 See Through Piece Black Lace CA011723 Black Sunnydaysweety One The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976, will be published in November 2011 by The University of Minnesota Press. He has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the National Gallery of Art, the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Studies, and the University of Queensland, and received Oberlin's B. Wade and Jane B. White Fellowship and the Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor Award.

Among Schinkel's numerous professional credentials, an architectural treatise is missing. But he must be recognized as the inventor of a new and singularly successful format of promotion, the oeuvre complète. A gifted designer of public displays, panoramas, and stage sets, Schinkel fed the visual avidity of his contemporaries (and continues to do so today) with ingenious images of his projects and buildings. A biographical thread replaces the categorical order among architectural projects and suggests a conspectus of works across time and place.

Kurt W. Forster is director of doctoral studies at the Yale School of Architecture. He has held professorships at Stanford, M.I.T., the Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich, and the Gropius Chair at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. He has organized major exhibitions, including the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and is now collaborating on exhibitions of Carlo Mollino (Munich) and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin). He also writes on historiography and contemporary photography.

Professor Friedman will discuss collaborations between architects, sculptors and lighting designers in mid-20th century American design. Specifically, she will elaborate projects between Richard Kelly, Richard Lippold and Harry Bertoia on the one side and Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) on the other. This talk represents a work-in-progress, drawing on her recent book American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale 2010).

Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art and Director of the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College. She is the author of numerous books and articles including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (U. Chicago, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Abrams, 1998), and most recently, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale, 2010).

The Frankfurt Kitchen Wednesday, December 1, 6:30 p.m.721 Orange Tab Rise Skinny High Jeans Blue Levi's Vintage Levi's® CqtTwT5Z MoMA Join MoMA's Design Curator Juliet Kinchin for a private tour of the new show "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen," and its centerpiece, an unusually complete example of the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926), designed by Austrian Architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. Columbia GSAPP Professor Mary McLeod, who has written on Lihotzky for MoMA's recent publication Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, will comment.